Salted Earth

Poetics of Place and Migration Through Four Artistic Journeys

Katy Beinart (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2026
Intellect Books (Verlag)
978-1-83595-271-9 (ISBN)

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The author makes a series of journeys, carrying out artistic practices uncovering histories, geographies, and biographies of salt and the places it has passed through. These practices explore both personal family history and the global entanglements of trade, labour, colonialism and migration narrated through a poetics of salt. 72 b&w 8 col. illus.

This book combines art, history and cultural studies, by way of a series of journeys on which the author and others make artworks. Each of these journeys resulted from an investigation into the meaning of an everyday substance, salt, in very different places – South Africa, Lithuania and Russia, Portugal and Haiti. Katy Beinart explores cultural meanings and everyday rituals of salt in these four journeys that link migration, trade, empire, slavery and colonialism.

Histories of salt have showed how it has been central to trade, power and capitalism, but these histories don’t offer a way of understanding salt’s poetics. Drawing on fiction, poetry and art Beinart weaves together an argument that develops a material poetics of salt, understanding how salt artworks can symbolise relationships, mobilities, migrations, memory, and intercultural connections from the past and present.

The book begins with a search for family history, and combines family memoir, travel stories, trade histories, auto-ethnographic reflection and artistic process. The journeys, artistic practices and embodied engagements with place and people this book narrates are a way into a different understanding of material entanglements and relations through sensory experience which opens up other ways of knowing.

Katy Beinart is a Brighton-based artist, researcher, and educator whose work includes sculpture, installation, drawing, film, and performance, and explores themes of memory, migration, identity, heritage, and place. She trained as an architect in Oxford and London and has since gone on develop an interdisciplinary artistic practice and to work on projects and commissions around the UK and abroad.

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Note on Translation and Terms

Prologue

Introduction: In Search of Salted Earth

Departure and return

The poetics of salt

Diasporic artistic mobilities

Sites and relations – Artistic practices

1. Journey to South Africa (and Back): Don’t Look Back (2010)/Memory Preservation Salts (2011)

Part 1: Journey to South Africa

Part 2: Memory Preservation Salts (2011) (return)

2. Journey to Eastern Europe (and back): Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt (2012)

Part 1: Journey to Eastern Europe

Part 2: Brixton Dinners (return)

3. Journey to Portugal (and Back): Salinas/Saltworks (2013)

Part 1: Journey to Portugal

Part 2: Saltworks (return)

4. Journey to Haiti (and Back): Goute Sel/A Taste of Salt (2013)

Part 1: Journey to Haiti

Part 2: Salt residues (return)

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	13.4.2026
Zusatzinfo	8 Illustrations, color; 72 Halftones, black and white
Sprache	englisch
Maße	170 x 244 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Reisen ► Reiseberichte
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-83595-271-2 / 1835952712
ISBN-13	978-1-83595-271-9 / 9781835952719
Zustand	Neuware